"PulseAudio Is Still Awesome"

[tildearrow]

I personally am perfectly fine with whatever works in this situation (not having gotten around to seriously learning how the audio system functions), however I wish I could separate the audio outputs/inputs, so I can select what I want to use, rather than whatever is connected externally takes over the whole system until it is unplugged. Spam

Come on, can somebody lock these old threads?

[moriel5]

That is a hardware/bios settings limitation. The motherboard audio out is disabled when the headphone is plugged in and you set front panel audio to HD audio in Bios settings. You can control audio outputs with Qasmixer when you set front panel audio to AC97. This is with the ASUSTeK model: PRIME B350M-K motherboard with a Realtek audio chip.

I understand what you mean, however I have no need to switch to AC'97 audio for this to properly function on Windows, this is on the Intel DH55HC (and yes, it uses a Realtek ALC888S).

[moriel5]

Use Alsa audio and Qasmixer or Alsamixergui.

I had already tried using ALSA directly, and with ALSAMixerGUI, but no dice. This is a driver limitation.

[nanonyme]

I'm just being impatient about Pipewire...

[moriel5]

I personally am perfectly fine with whatever works in this situation (not having gotten around to seriously learning how the audio system functions), however I wish I could separate the audio outputs/inputs, so I can select what I want to use, rather than whatever is connected externally takes over the whole system until it is unplugged.

Example: I am using the internal speakers of my laptop, I connect my headphones to the audio jack, and I wish to be able to use either the internal speakers or the headphones at will, without disconnecting the headphones.

Realtek allows this on Windows (via closed source drivers), however this functionality still has not made it's way to the open-source drivers.

[Grogan]

I used to be quite butthurt over pulseaudio, and refused to use any distro that used it (I ditched my beloved Slackware because of it!) but it causes me no issues now on my last few *buntu based gaming setups and I don't have to disable it for anything. I'm doing a lot of games through Steam Play/Proton too.

I don't use it on my more "serious" systems though (I have a Crux setup that's lean and mean, with everything compiled and optimized and if I don't want something, it's not there to be linked in the first place). I really have no need of it, plain jane alsa is fine. My Crux setup has too much custom compiled stuff in /usr/local to just "upgrade" so I'll be looking for a new one soon. I'm watching Slackware Current. When the distro guts are up to speed for Plasma 5, I think I'll go back. Pulseaudio is a battle I've lost (I surrender).

What I object to most are the viral dependencies Pulse causes, such that even things that have nothing to do with audio get it as an inherited dependency and won't run if the libraries are out of whack. That's fine if all you do is "apt-get install distropackage" and I don't care on my Kubuntu setup, where the only thing I build is my kernel and use repos and PPA's for everything else. (I almost feel "guilty" it's so easy lol)

I just have simple onboard audio (hda_intel, realtek codec... bog standard) and speakers though, I've never had a complex audio setup.

[Lucy369]

I've found PulseAudio to be an excellent piece of software at all levels. It works much better than every other Linux audio library for almost every possible usecase. As a developer I also enjoyed the excellent sound API they provide. For instance with a single line I could enable audio cancelling and let PA determine if, with the current setup, audio cancelling is necessary, and potentially enable it live (while my app is playing) if the user plugs something etc. No lower-level system have access to the necessary information to do this : it should really be done in userspace unless the whole desktop is put in the kernel. Note that OS X and Windows now also include similar sound servers. mcdvoice

[Lucy369]

It's not people ranting and spreading FUD, it's people ranting and complaining about a product that has done nothing but get in their way and kill their audio quality. Sure, for some users pulse works fine, Paul Frields is clearly one of these people. But everytime I have personally tried to use pulseaudio, it has met me with high latency issues (sound lag) and in some slightly rarer cases, heavily reduced sound quality and/or buzzing sounds where there should be no sounds at all. Not to mention it is a nightmare to configure it, especially since some configuration options don't always work (and I'm talking about configuring it by editing the settings files, not using some GUI).

And it doesn't take a smart person to see that overall, pulseaudio is a terrible sound server design, it's slow, it's fat, it's heavy and it really doesn't do anything in the long run, the only real use case I see for pulseaudio is streaming audio over network, that's it, that's the only thing I see it do that ALSA can't do on it's own, better than how Pulse does it. That's not FUD, that's just my factual experiences with sound on Linux. I'm not a huge fan of ALSA, but I really, really hate pulse.

[unixfan2001]

So this issue depends on alsa developpers... good to know. Where to get a list of sound cards where hardware mixer works on linux systems?

I've to make disappear PULSE AUDIO from my linux operating system, so I prefer to buy an older card rather than to use this piece of crap of pulse audio server.

Translation: "I don't know shit about sound systems and am unable to google a generic hardware support list, yet have decided that Pulse Audio is crap and Lennart Poettering a horrible developer"...

[unixfan2001]

I felt embarrassed just reading that blog oh god... But I'm glad things work for him.
But things work even better if you remove unnecessary level of complexity and simply use ALSA :P

Abstractions are hardly "unnecessary level of complexity".

Quite the opposite, actually.